Marieke de Winkel, Fashion and Fancy: Dress and Meaning in Rembrandt’s Paintings (Amsterdam, 2006), 164f. Although Rembrandt may have worn berets on occasion, he also tended to include them in self-portraits in combination with fanciful or imaginary components of dress, such as the Asian patterned silk scarf and heavy gold chains. See, for example, his 1629 Self-Portrait in The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, oil on panel, 89.7 × 73.5 cm, acc. P21n6.

Marieke de Winkel, “‘Eene der deftigsten dragten’: The Iconography of the Tabbaard and the Sense of Tradition in Dutch Seventeenth-Century Portraiture,” in Beeld en zelfbeeld in de Nederlandse kunst, 1550–1750/Image and Self-Image in Netherlandish Art, 1550–1750, Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 46 (Zwolle, 1995): 145–67.

It is possibly significant that Rembrandt’s assistant at this time, Govaert Flinck (1615–60), had confronted this stigma as he sought to become an artist: see Arnold Houbraken, De groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen, 3 vols. (Amsterdam 1718–21; rev. ed., The Hague, 1753; reprint, Amsterdam, 1976), 2:18–19.

On the Polish character of this head covering, see Michael Zell, Reframing Rembrandt: Jews and the Christian Image in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 2002), 46–48, and Alfred Rubens, A History of Jewish Costume, 2nd ed. (London, 1973), 104–5.

This assessment draws support from Joachim von Moltke’s attribution of the painting in its overpainted state to Flinck. See Joachim Wolfgang von Moltke, Govaert Flinck, 1615–1660 (Amsterdam, 1965), 246–47, under no. 101. A somewhat similar painting by Flinck is his Bust of a Young Manin a Plumed Beret, 1637, oil on canvas, 73 × 57.5 cm, The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, inv. 782 (see Portrait of Antonie Coopal, RR-103, fig. 6).